Lying, Like a ... Rug.

Hello.

Last night I woke up at 1 a.m., 2:30 a.m, 4 a.m., 5:05 a.m., 6:15 a.m. and 8 a.m. Each time, I sorely regretting having just hiked the Andes on dry ground, wearing showshoes, and barebacking a mature Andean goat to get across small streams, all of which I’d found are hell on the torso muscles used for steadying yourself. Each time I awoke I then remembered that I had not in fact hiked the Andes, or ridden a llama or a goat, or worn snowshoes, but I had unwisely gotten both a flu shot and a Covid shot the day before. An occasional side effect of this can be full-body muscle aches that can incorporate themselves into fitful, vivid dreams.

This all actually happened; however, it is also all beside the point, except inasmuch as it put me in a foul, vengeful mood to write.

So I decided to write to you about the naked despicableness of the Republican Party Leadership, in particular their willingness to tell increasingly bizarre, bald-face lies as the election approaches, in the desperate support of the mentally ill Donald Trump. Before I went to sleep I had just watched something so blatantly and offensively dishonest that it mixed in there with the Andes escapade.

Have you seen the brief, stunning back-and-forth between Jake Tapper and Mike “Johnson,” the aptly named Speaker of the House, on the issue of Donald Trump’s threat to sic military force against “the enemies from within,” meaning his political opponents? If you haven’t — it’s been kinda buried under the firehose of news — you should. It’s just five minutes.

Johnson’s breathtaking mendacity reminds me of a standup comedy routine by the late, great Bill Hicks. Hicks was discussing the flagrant lies offered under oath by the police officers on trial for chasing down Black motorist Rodney King and beating him half to death, an atrocity that led to the 1992 L.A. riots. The police mugging had been recorded on videotape.

Hicks:

“Do these guys have balls, or what?? These guys carry their balls in a wheelbarrow, man.” (Mimicking a cop driving his testicles in a wheelbarrow, walking up to the witness stand through a narrow aisle in a crowded courtroom: “ ‘Scuse me, ‘scuse me, man with big balls is here to testify…”.)

“So, the officer looks in the camera and actually says, ‘Oh, that Rodney King beating tape? It’s all in how you look at it.’ ”

“The courtroom murmurs, ‘Jesus, what balls! I have never seen balls of this magnitude!’ ”

“All in how you look at it? Well, would you care to tell the court how you are looking at that, officer?”

“Sure. It’s how you look at it. For instance, well, if you play it backwards, you see us help King up and send him on his way …”.

—

That’s Mike Johnson, denying in deadpan that Trump never intended to threaten his political opponents with prosecution and incarceration even though he has been quite candid and viciously articulate about what he intends to do. There is precedent: That very plan was literally in Hitler’s playbook, laid out in advance: Once der Führer was elected legally — using the democratic system as intended by tweezing the fears of the populace — he promised to erase parliament, destroy the so-called Deep State, punish his enemies, and establish an autocratic regime based on obedience to the will of the fascist state. In fact, as Heather Cox Richardson points out today, the first denizens of Dachau were not Jews, they were political enemies — the enemies from within. Johnson felt he had to reinterpret Trump lest this real agenda be too clear.

—

Okay, so. I think most of us appreciate the nature of the upcoming election: It is the most consequential of our lifetimes. It could wind up being one of the worst days in American history, or one of the best. I’ve decided I would like to be with you all on Election Day, mostly because (1) it’s a Tuesday, so. But also, (2) because I don’t want to be alone with my neurosis. I would like to share yours, too.

I’m going to try a special edition of The Gene Pool. We’ll have a dip-in, truncated version of the GP at the usual time, and then throw it back open at 8 p.m. when the Eastern polls begin to close. I’ll take real-time Questions and Observations as usual, but also keep the Comments open for hours. I am hoping much of the give and take will be among you guys, in the Comments. I will lurk. I will kibbitz. I will probably bloviate.

It’s an experiment. We’ll see how it goes. Maybe it will become a Thing.

To participate in the Comments, you will have to be a paid subscriber. But there’s a very cheap and expedient way to do that, if you are so inclined. Sign up on a month-by-month basis — $5 a month — and cancel whenever you want, including the next day; the cancellation process is a one-minute affair. Some readers regularly do that once a year just so they can enter the What Kind of Foal Am I Invitational contest, then opt out again. We don’t begrudge it. It is your right, and our privilege.

So if this interests you and you are not already a paid subscriber, please consider taking that mini-step anytime in the next week. Worst-case scenario, you’ve ponied up $5 for a weird night while history is made and we can all make blithering fools of ourselves. I might tell dirty jokes.

Do it here:

Speaking of dirty jokes: Did you get to read through Trump’s lunatic, schlong-crazed rant about Arnold Palmer in the speech he (Trump) gave in Latrobe, Pa., native home of Rolling Balls Rock beer and Arnold Palmer. Trump was obsessed with the allegedly impressive size of the golf great’s manhood. He happily shared this with a crowd of men, women and children.

It makes you wonder. I’ve read through most of the infantile jokes he made, and they were curiously … envious. In the end, Trump noted that Palmer would “use very stiff-shafted clubs, very strong — for those of you that aren’t golfers, that’s for like good golfers, with power. Very stiff-shafted.”

And:

“This is a guy that was all man. This man was strong and tough. And I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my God, that's unbelievable.’”

Definitely … penis envy. The poor little mushroom man.

The very best fallout from this came the next day, when Thomas Hauser, the sportswriter who’d written a book about Palmer, reported on a conversation he’d had with Palmer’s daughter, Peg, in 2018, two years after Palmer’s death. Palmer had been politically conservative but Peg said her dad was revolted by Trump’s boorishness.

“My dad didn’t like people who act like they’re better than other people,” Peg Palmer said. “He had no patience for people who are dishonest and cheat. My dad was disciplined. He wanted to be a good role model. He was appalled by Trump’s lack of civility and what he began to see as Trump’s lack of character.”

"One moment stands out in my mind," she told Hauser. "My dad and I were at home in Latrobe. He died in September, so this was before the 2016 election. The television was on. Trump was talking. And my dad made a sound of disgust — like ‘uck’ or ‘ugg’ — like he couldn't believe the arrogance and crudeness of this man who was the nominee of the political party that he believed in. Then he said, ‘He’s not as smart as we thought he was’ and walked out of the room. What would my dad think of Donald Trump today? I think he’d cringe."

—

The funniest deconstruction of this whole penile servitude that I’ve seen came from John Bunyan of Cincinnati, a contributor to The Invitational back in the day. He does stand-up comedy, too. In the Style Invitational Devotees Group on Facebook, he wrote, summoning a Yiddish word: “Arnold Palmer had some long drives, but have you ever seen his putts?”

—

And finally, today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll, on a controversial but gloriously apolitical subject. Beware, there may heated, spit-flying disagreements amongst yourselves.

—

Now we enter the Real-Time Segment of The Gene Pool, where I take your Questions and Observations and try to answer them in Real Time. Many of today’s Qs and O’s so far, center on my request, in the Weekend Gene Pool, for times you may have missed earlier clues about a person’s character. Also, thoughts on antiques. As always. send them here:

—

Q: My wife used to work at a nonprofit. During an interview to hire an additional person, my wife felt something was just "off" and didn't want to pick this person but was overruled by higher-ups. 

Within a few days of starting, the new person demanded new furniture, a special chair, etc. Upper management gave it to her, and she seemed like a decent employee.

One Monday morning a few months later, my wife goes into the office and finds all of the special ordered furniture gone and a resignation letter in a folder on the floor.   – Todd

A: Wow. 

I once hired a woman to be the art director of my magazine.  She had excellent design sense, but seemed a bit unfamiliar, and/or unconcerned with, the larger culture of journalism — its mores and protocols.    A few months into her tenure, she did a nice four-page display of the work of a local chair designer she had discovered.    She never told us that the chair designer was her sister.  We discovered it through a perplexed phone call from a reader. Yes, I fired her. 

—

Q: When I was 24, I was a bridesmaid in my cousin’s wedding. My cousin was the groom. I knew at the time that I was asked because the bride essentially needed one more to get the numbers even. I didn’t know her well but got  along well with my cousin. Fine. On the wedding day, it came to pass that the bride  other bridesmaids had gone to get the hair, makeup, and nails done and I was excluded from this ritual. I thought this was rude and my feelings were a little hurt.  I didn’t care that much personally (again, we weren’t friends, really) but I thought it was classless.

Skip about 20 years. Nobody likes the wife, who’s essentially a self-centered soul who doesn’t treat my cousin very well. But they’re still married. Fine. She has her own business. At a family Thanksgiving, she crows with delight at how she has deliberately failed to pay state payroll taxes for years. My brother is at this dinner and reports the news, aghast (the rest of us are rule followers). She is a law-breaking cheat! We weren’t surprised. My brother and I seriously considered reporting her to the state but didn’t, because we are not finks. I don’t know if she’ll ever be caught, but I hope so. 

A:  This presents an interesting ethical conundrum.  Why, I believe we shall explore it right now as an Insta-poll!

TIMELY TIP: If you’re reading this on an email: Just click on the headline in the email and it will deliver you to the full column online. Keep refreshing the screen to see the new questions and answers that appear as I regularly update the post.

Here we go.

—

Q: Hi! It's your internet friend Elizardbeth again!

Many years ago I was hosting a very large party at my house, and did not know all the attendees. Some were invited by my then-husband, and some were friends of friends. So when one of the guests was following a friend around in a way that was making her visibly uncomfortable, I introduced myself and tried to steer him away gently by nudging him to a different crowd. Gentle wasn't getting the job done, he grew belligerent, my friend grew fearful, nothing I did de-escalated the situation, and I attempted to bounce him. He insisted my now-ex wouldn't throw him out, and he was right. So I tried again by pinching his ear and leading him out the front door and to the end of the driveway and firmly told him I never wanted to see him again. I told the man I divorced the following year that he had lousy taste in friends and he told me I needed to chill out.

A month later, this guy killed his partner and their child. I have since learned to pay more attention to my own read on a situation than that of two men validating each other's terrible behavior.

My story has a bonus opposite to balance it out: About 15 years later I went on a date with Dan, who I found handsome and easy to talk to and with whom I had mutual friends and shared interests. I figured hey if he wanted to get together again, I'd say yes. As I was finishing my drink and starting my goodbyes, he said, come to my work van, I have something for you. I said, that's what a serial killer would say. He looked genuinely sorry and said, oh, I am not a serial killer! I said: still what a serial killer would say! And he looked contrite and disappointed, so I said, awww it's okay, I'll bite. When we got to his van, he gave me a small container with three eggs his chickens had laid that morning. It was the strangest thing I'd ever encountered on a date, and I just stared at the eggs, and him, and walked home.

When my best friend asked how it had gone, I told her about the eggs and she said, oh, no, you can never see him again. Dan and I have been married for a couple of years now, and he and my friend get along fine, and the fresh eggs are absolutely delicious.

–

Q:  Wow, and wow.  Your first story is wonderfully creepy, the second is just plain wonderful.  I feel it necessary to point out that your Twitter pic, at least when I was still on Twitter, featured a photo of your face; you had inserted french fries into you nostrils.  

—

Q: I respectfully submit Andruw Jones for consideration in the Stupid Sports Names Hall of Fame.  ("Andruw" is pronounced just like "Andrew".)

A: You know, I always assumed it was a product of his place of birth — he’s from Curacao, and maybe that’s how Andrew is spelled there?  But no, it turns out that his ma simply liked the look of it.   Apparently that didn’t faze Andruw, because he named his son, um, “Druw.”  

–

Q: You mentioned an Albany newspaper for which you once worked, but you didn’t name it.  Did it have such a ridiculous name that you don't even want to write it down? — R. Basler

A: Yes, Bob, and you know perfectly well the name of the paper, because you sat about ten feet from me in the newsroom of the Albany Knickerbocker News.   

The name was a problem because non-local people tended not to return your calls.  It’s as though the newspaper was named The Albany Underpants. Or The Albany Rural Shitkicker. Once, when I called someone back and eventually got him on the line, he apologized and said he’d heard the name as “The Nicaragua News,” and figured I had just called the wrong guy, inasmuch as he was, like, a large appliance repairman in the Bronx.  

Those were strange days, people.     Bob Basler and I once were permitted to write a serialized, locally based, fitfully semi-funny fictional short story about the adventures of its protagonist, whom we named “Biff Wellington.”   I always regretted having to abandon that name when the series chugged to an ungainly end, but resurrected it just recently in a different context.  It is the pseudonym I have given to Dan Stone, my editor at Substack. 

Speaking of which, Basler writes an excellent Substack called 5 a.m. Stories.  Warning: He likes puns. 

—

Q: Report the cousin’s wife. At a minimum we need to live in a society where people who do things like evade taxes don’t feel that they can safely and openly boast about their misdeeds. Associated: I went to a small college with an honor code, part of which was a requirement to confront and report when you knew someone else had cheated. Did people take advantage of the system to cheat? I don’t know. Did people openly talk about cheating? Absolutely not.

A: You might be right, but I would not do it. I believe we are not all government-deputized informants. I also would like to know if the writer would even have considered informing if she LIKED the person. That seems like a bad calculus for a decision. But that’s just me.

—

Q: Here's a small something about someone that should have given me a clue about bad things to come: 

In the early 1980s, at the University of Pennsylvania, where I was an undergrad, the New York City real estate developer Donald Trump came back to his alma mater to speak at the newly opened Wharton School building. He was asked what contributions his Wharton education had played in his career, and answered confidently that Penn had played zero role in his success.

My two thoughts at the time: 1) What an asshole, and 2) He'd be a terrible politician.

A:  Well, you got it half right.  But what he also was, even back then, was a fabulous liar.   He frequently mentions Wharton as part of his bona fides… 

–

Q: The Post ran a bunch of letters from (surprise) men attempting to explain why they're voting for Trump. 

Is this journalism malpractice? I read them, just to see if there were any good reasons (there aren't). Did I learn anything? No. The answer is basically "I won't take this seriously, and you can't make me." I guess I do see the value in a newspaper at least noting these views for the record, in case these people want to pretend in the future they made better choices when it mattered. 

A: I don’t like to criticize readers, but these readers are idiots. My God, just listen to them.

No, this is not journalism malpractice.  We learned a lot about what is in the minds of the Trump voters:  Nothing.  

—

Q: Regarding early warning signs: In March, 2000 , I attended the ACC basketball tournament in Charlotte. Through good happenstance, we had Georgia Tech Coach Bobby Cremins’ courtesy tickets. These seats were four rows from the floor. The first three rows were VIP seating and separated from our row by a low railing.

Between games, I was leaning on this railing sipping an adult beverage. A  pregnant lady of about my age ( 50) , carrying a toddler approached from the VIP seats and asked me. “ Do I know you?” I introduced myself. She did not know me. She was obviously an intelligent, funny woman . We bs-ed awhile. She handled the 800 lb gorilla issue by acknowledging that she had started making babies again in her late 40s and early 50s. I said “ good for you,” then asked her, “ so who do you have to sleep with to get to sit on that side of the railing?”

She said, “ the junior Senator from the state of North Carolina,” and pointed to an impossibly handsome man standing close by and holding sway with a posse of tomato-faced Southern dudes cut from the same cloth, say, as Alex Murdaugh ( hell, one of them might have been Alex Murdaugh). Somewhere in our chat, this fascinating woman had introduced herself with the fairly innocuous name of Elizabeth Edwards. Her husband was Senator John Edwards.

She waved over her husband and he dutifully broke away from the overaged frat boys and came and shook  my hand. He was all perfect hair and teeth. He quickly determined that I was neither a constituent nor a potential benefactor, gave his pregnant wife and little girl perfunctory kisses and melted back in with the VIP swells.

I’ve been around lotsa politicians, including a good friend who was a retired ( by the electorate) former U.S. Senator, so I was familiar with the breed. But there was something about this guy that was just hinky. He was one of those types that come across as authentically inauthentic. Elizabeth, on the other hand, seemed genuine, intelligent and funny.

Events, of course, would prove that John Edwards was a selfish, lying prick. He broke Elizabeth’s heart with his infidelities and brazen deceit. She was a brilliant attorney in her own right who  gave herself over to his career. She had those two late-life babies to help the family heal from the death of their oldest son in a car wreck. She finally left the shitbird but died soon after at a young age from breast cancer.

– Jon Ketzner

A: Thank you. 

—

Q: Your  poll question about antiques fails to make a most relevant distinction:  Can the item still be used for its original purpose?  

I treasure the necklace-watch my grandmother was given to mark her church confirmation, perhaps around 1906.  I rarely use it, but it keeps accurate time when I do.  Also, soon I will pass to my own granddaughter the wooden child's rocking chair that Grandma herself used in the 1890s, as did subsequently her daughter, I, and my children.  Additionally, Grandma's cast-iron 5-quart Dutch oven, patented 1920 and probably acquired that year when she married, has gotten heavy use in my own kitchen for about forty years.  Those robust antiques all are worth cherishing!

On the other hand, because baby-product standards have changed, Grandma's lovely  antique cradle was too dangerous to risk using for the aforementioned granddaughter.  We intend to donate it to Grandma's hometown history museum.

Existence through many years can demonstrate ongoing value ... or can be just old.  Rather like people.

Q: One of my big regrets was not being able to use a gorgeous 1910 oak crib for my babies. Man, it was gorgeous.   Its sides were horizontal bars, not vertical; any small toddler could climb it like a ladder and face-plant onto the floor.

—

Q: If you think that Mike Johnson was bad, get a load of Glenn Youngkin, aka, Governor Brown Shirt.

A: Yeah, Tapper mentioned this in his testy colloquy with Johnson. Check it out. It’s devastating.

—

Q; It seems to me that for almost every picture I see of Trump, I want to smack the smug right off his face. AITAH?

A: No.

—

Q: I can't vote in the polls.  I'm a paid subscriber, but when I click the vote button it says I'm not.  I'm grousing about it here because I can't find any page that lets me tell the Substack trolls about it.I can't vote in the polls.  I'm a paid subscriber, but when I click the vote button it says I'm not.  I'm grousing about it here because I can't find any page that lets me tell the Substack trolls about it.

A:  Something odd is going on.  You CAN vote in the polls, even if you weren’t a paid subscriber.  You can also send in Questions and observations, even if you were not paid.   You just can’t Comment or enter the Invitational.     I’d answer you directly and try to figure out what is going on BUT YOU DID NOT GIVE ME CONTACT INFO in this Q and O.  Please write back with that information.

Is anyone else having this problem?

—

Q; While getting a guided tour through the workspace of a company I’d just been hired by, I failed to note that no one there had any personal items on their desk. Not a picture, not a plant, not even a coffee mug they’d brought from home. They also had their jackets hung over the backs of their chairs rather than on the conspicuously empty coatrack. There was no company policy banning tchotchkes from cubicles. I quickly learned that the place was so toxic that employees understood that their inevitable departure — whether by firing or quitting — would be sudden and immediate, and they were always prepared to be able to simply stand up, grab their coat and leave on a moment’s notice. I witnessed this a dozen times and, when my time came, I knew the drill.

A: Interesting!   I once edited a terrific story by Marjorie Williams and Ruth Marcus that had a flavor of this.  It was a profile of Alan Dershowitz, and it got deeper than most stories ever get to Dersh. 

It ended this way: 

“Dershowitz will acknowledge that he is somewhat sensitive. But the phenomenon, Silverglate says, is beyond thin-skinned. "Thin-skinned is you don't like what they say about you. It's a little more than that: It's that he feels that he can't let these assaults go unanswered, because these people are trying to rip the world down around him."

Which leads Silverglate to the second thing about Dershowitz that he calls primordial -- an external insecurity, based on the belief that societal tolerance is a tenuous thing. 

"He lives," says Silverglate, "with the knowledge of the fragility of the veneer of civilization."

He tells the story of when Dershowitz lived in a Harvard-owned house near Brattle Street, among the best addresses in Cambridge, which the university offered to sell to him "at a very, very modest price." Dershowitz declined. Silverglate watched in chagrin for several years as the house's value rose some $40,000 a year, and still Dershowitz continued to rent. "And finally I sat him down one day and said, 'What is this? This is irrational.' 

And he realized what it was. Our relatives in Europe weren't allowed to own property. They had all of their worldly possessions in gold, in coins. ... And in fact, many of the European Jews who were saved, were saved because they had the goods with which to bribe border guards to let them out. So for years, Alan by instinct would not put his money into something that he couldn't put into his pocket and run."

Alan Dershowitz, outsider.

—

This is Gene. I am calling us down. Please keep sending in Q’s and O’s, which I will address Thursday.

Send ‘em here.